The
media version of the CIA leak case is that the White House illegally
revealed a CIA employee’s identity because her husband, Joseph Wilson,
was an administration critic. But former prosecutor Joseph E. diGenova
says the real story is that the CIA “launched a covert operation”
against the President when it sent Wilson on the mission to Africa
to investigate the Iraq-uranium link. DiGenova, a former Independent
Counsel who prosecuted several high-profile cases and has extensive
experience on Capitol Hill, including as counsel to several Senate
committees, is optimistic that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald
will figure it all out.

DiGenova
tells this columnist, “It seems to me somewhat strange, in terms of
CIA tradecraft, that if you were really attempting to protect the
identity of a covert officer, why would you send her husband overseas
on a mission, without a confidentiality agreement, and then allow
him when he came back to the United States to write an op-ed piece
in the New York Times about it.”

That
mission, he explained, leads naturally to the questions: Who is this
guy? And how did he get this assignment? “That’s not the way you protect
the identity of a covert officer,” he said. “If it is, then [CIA director]
Porter Goss is doing the right thing in cleaning house” at the agency.

If
the CIA is the real villain in the case, then almost everything we
have been told about the scandal by the media is wrong. What’s more,
it means that the CIA, perhaps the most powerful intelligence agency
in the U.S. Government, was deliberately trying to undermine the Bush
Administration’s Iraq War policy. The liberals who are anxious for
indictments of Bush Administration officials in this case should start
paying attention to this aspect of the scandal. They may be opposed
to the Iraq War, but since when is the CIA allowed to run covert operations
against an elected president of the U.S.?

DiGenova
first made his astounding comments about the Wilson affair being a
covert operation against the President on the Imus in the Morning
Show, carried nationally on radio and MSNBC-TV. I wondered whether
these serious charges would be refuted or probed by the media. Imus,
a shock jock who has spent several days grieving and joking about
the death of his cat, didn’t grasp their significance. But the mainstream
press didn’t seem interested, either.

DiGenova
told me he believes there has been a “war between the White House
and the CIA over intelligence” and that the agency, in the Wilson
affair, “was using the sort of tactics it uses in covert actions overseas.”
One has to consider the implications of this statement. It means that
the CIA was using Wilson for the purpose of undermining the Bush Administration’s
Iraq policy.

If
this is the case, then one has to conclude that the CIA’s covert operation
against the President was successful to a point. It generated an investigation
of the White House after officials began trying to set the record
straight to the press about the Wilson mission. At this point, it’s
still not clear what if anything Fitzgerald has on these officials.
If they’re indicted for making inconsistent statements about their
discussions with one another or the press, that would seem to be a
pathetically weak case. And it would not get to the heart of the issue—the
CIA’s war against Bush.

One
of those apparently threatened with indictment, as Times reporter
Judith Miller’s account of her grand jury testimony revealed, is an
agency critic named Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President
Dick Cheney. Miller said that Libby was frustrated and angry about
“selective leaking” by the CIA and other agencies to “distance themselves
from what he recalled as their unequivocal prewar intelligence assessments.”
Miller said Libby believed the “selective leaks” from the CIA were
an attempt to “shift blame to the White House” and were part of a
“perverted war” over the war in Iraq.

Wilson
was clearly part of that war. He came back from Niger in Africa and
wrote the New York Times column insisting there was no Iraqi deal
to purchase uranium for a nuclear weapons program. In fact, however,
Wlson had misrepresented his own findings, and the Senate Intelligence
Committee found there was additional evidence of Iraqi attempts to
buy uranium.

DiGenova
raises serious questions about the CIA role not only in the Wilson
mission but in the referral to the Justice Department that culminated
in the appointment of a special prosecutor. At this point in the media
feeding frenzy over the story, the issue of how the investigation
started has almost been completely lost. The answer is that it came
from the CIA. Acting independently and with great secrecy, the CIA
contacted the Justice Department with “concern” about articles in
the press that included the “disclosure” of “the identity of an employee
operating under cover.” The CIA informed the Justice Department that
the disclosure was “a possible violation of criminal law.” This started
the chain of events that is the subject of speculative news articles
almost every day.

The
CIA’s version of its contacts with the Justice Department was contained
in a 4-paragraph letter to Rep. John Conyers, ranking Democratic Member
of the House Judiciary Committee. Conyers and other liberal Democrats
had been clamoring for the probe.

DiGenova
doubts that the CIA had a case to begin with. He says he would like
to see what sworn information was provided to the Justice Department
about the status of Wilson’s CIA wife, Valerie Plame, and what “active
measures” the CIA was taking to protect her identity. The implication
is that her status was not classified or protected and that the agency
simply used the stories about her identity to create the scandal that
seems to occupy so much attention these days.

But
if the purpose was not only to undermine the Iraq War policy but to
stop the administration from reforming the agency, it hasn’t completely
worked. Indeed, the Washington Post ran a long story by Dafna Linzer
on October 19 about the “turmoil” in the agency as personnel either
quit or are forced out by CIA Director Goss. Like so many stories
about the CIA leak case, this story reflected the views of CIA bureaucrats
who despise what Goss is doing and resist supervision or reform of
their operations. Members of the press do not want to be seen as too
close to the Bush Administration, but acting as scribblers for the
CIA bureaucracy, which failed America on 9/11, is perfectly acceptable.

DiGenova’s
comments might be dismissed as just the view of an administration
defender. But his comments reflect the facts about the case that emerged
when the Senate Intelligence Committee conducted an independent investigation.
Wilson, who became an adviser to the Kerry for President campaign,
had claimed his CIA wife had no role in recommending him for the trip,
but the committee determined that was not true. Why would Wilson misrepresent
the truth about her if the purpose were not to conceal the curious
nature of the CIA role and its hidden agenda in his controversial
mission? And who in the CIA besides his wife was behind it?

In
this regard, Miller’s account of her testimony to the grand jury disclosed
that Fitzgerald had asked whether Libby had complained about nepotism
behind the Wilson trip, a reference to the role played by Plame. This
is the line of inquiry that could lead, if Fitzgerald pursues it,
to unraveling the CIA “covert operation” behind the Wilson affair.
There may be rogue elements at the agency who are conducting their
own foreign policy, in contravention of the official foreign policy
of the U.S. Government elected by the American people. Like it or
not, Bush is the President and he is supposed to run the CIA, not
the other way around.

Fitzgerald
has the opportunity to break this case wide open. Or else he can take
the politically correct approach, which is popular with the press,
and go after administration officials.

One
irony of the case is that Miller is under strong attack by the left
as an administration lackey when she didn’t even write an article
at the time noting Libby’s criticisms of the CIA and the Wilson trip.
Did her “other sources,” perhaps in the CIA, persuade her to drop
the story? We may never know because she claims that she got Fitzgerald
to agree not to question her about them. But what she did eventually
report, after spending 85 days in jail, amounts to an exoneration
of the Bush Administration. Libby, Karl Rove and others obviously
believed they could not take on the CIA directly but had to get their
story out indirectly through the press. They got burned by Miller
and other journalists.

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Goss’s
CIA house-cleaning, of course, has come too late to save the administration
from being victimized in the Wilson/Plame affair. Some officials could
get indicted because of faulty or inconsistent memories. It is also
obvious that liberal journalists are so excited over possible indictments
of Bush officials that they are willing to overlook the agency’s manipulation
of public policy and the press. But if the CIA has been out-of-control,
subverting the democratic process and undermining the president, the
American people have a right to know. If Fitzgerald doesn’t blow the
whistle on this, the Congress should hold public hearings and do so.

Cliff Kincaid, a veteran journalist and media
critic, Cliff concentrated in journalism and communications at the University
of Toledo, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Cliff has written or co-authored nine books on
media and cultural affairs and foreign policy issues.

Cliff has appeared on Hannity & Colmes, The O’Reilly
Factor, Crossfire and has been published in the Washington Post, Washington
Times, Chronicles, Human Events and Insight.
Web Site: www.AIM.org
E-Mail: kincaid@comcast.net

One
irony of the case is that Miller is under strong attack by the left as
an administration lackey when she didn’t even write an article at the
time noting Libby’s criticisms of the CIA and the Wilson trip.